Tag: work

The Importance of Being Silent—By John Arthur Sweet

A DIALOGUE. Persons: John Arthur and Pal.

Scene: A deck in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, one summer day.

JOHN ARTHUR: Would you like some more kombucha? No? … Hey, I’ve got a little story for you. A while ago, I submitted one of my monologues to a theatre festival where I was hoping to perform it. The comment I got back from the Artistic Director was that the show had too few words in it, relative to the show’s length. He estimated, based on the word count, that the show should take thirty-five minutes, but I’d indicated that it takes sixty minutes in performance, and he said that twenty-five minutes of non-verbal action is too much. Can you believe that?

PAL: Well, yeah. I mean, people are busy these days. If you give them silence, they’ll just start checking their phones. How many words was it, anyway?

JOHN ARTHUR: According to the appropriately named Word, it was 4,522.

PAL: So, that’s a lot of words. Get them out, and let your audience get on their way. Don’t be precious! Everyone has their story to tell, opinions to deliver. But you don’t need to milk it. Get your message across, and then make room for others.

JOHN ARTHUR: But … First of all, I’m not delivering opinions. It’s a piece of theatre.

PAL: That’s fine, but there’s a point to it, I imagine. You just need to make your point without dragging things out.

JOHN ARTHUR: Why does everyone assume that everything has to have a point?

PAL: You’re a writer, yeah? So when you sit down to write, you must have some point you want to get across.

JOHN ARTHUR: I have something to communicate, yes. But it’s not necessarily a “point,” as you call it. I’m not a journalist.

PAL: Okay, let’s say you have an imaginative notion—how’s that?—an imaginative notion to transmit. So, in the monologue you were just telling me about, you had—what was it?—4,522 words by which to transmit that notion. That’s a lot of words! There’s no need to then drag it out—

JOHN ARTHUR: If you say “drag it out” one more time! Anyway, all this “dragging out,” as you call it, is what is otherwise known as Life.

PAL: Oh no, please, don’t get all metaphysical on me, it’s ten o’clock in the morning. What I’m saying is, words have meanings. You’re a writer, so express your meaning in words and then leave it at that, don’t dr—

JOHN ARTHUR: Oh no, stop! Words, words, words!! It’s not all about the words. There’s another way of looking at this. Look, if that artistic director is right, and my monologue features twenty-five minutes where I’m not speaking, then that means a group of people who mostly don’t know one another are sitting in a darkened room together in quasi-silence for twenty-five minutes. When else does that ever happen?

[Silence.]

PAL: Look, I’m sorry that guy didn’t want your show. But I don’t really understand what point you’re making here.

JOHN ARTHUR: The point I’m making, since you’re so fond of “points,” is that we’re drowning in words. As a society, we are gasping for air, desperately thrashing around for a glimpse of the sun as we go under, dragged down beneath a tidal wave of words. Listen, back in about 1999, an editor I worked with raised tired eyes from her computer screen one afternoon and said to me wryly, “I’ve just been dealing with my e-mails. God help us, there is not a thought these days that is allowed to go unexpressed!” That was twenty years ago she said that, and all we were dealing with then was e-mail. Now it’s social media, smartphones, apps, and they’re all talking to us all the time, in words. We have words coming out of our mouths and entering our ears, we’ve got earbuds stuck in our ears to replace some words with other words, we’re writing like mad in the virtual world, tweets, posts, blogs, vlogs. Everybody’s a writer! We’ve got words seeping out of our—

PAL: Don’t be vulgar.

JOHN ARTHUR: No, but honestly, how many more words do we need?

PAL: Right! So don’t do your show at all. That’s 4,522 fewer words in the world.

JOHN ARTHUR: But I’m a writer-performer! And also an editor. I live by words.

PAL: Sweetie, you’re getting all worked up and not making any sense. So you’re a writer and you want to make words. But, you insist, there are too many words in the world. So what can I do to help you? You seem to be at an impasse. Would you like some lemonade?

JOHN ARTHUR: I guess what I’m asking is, are we simply aiming to cram as many words into our lives—into the available time, be it sixty minutes or sixty years—as possible? Or does silence (or, at the very least, word-free time) have a place? I just think that maybe, in 2020, one should have an opinion about this—especially if one is a writer. As writers, maybe we have a responsibility to write less and better, and even to think sometimes about what maybe doesn’t need to be expressed in words. What opinion or thought or observation can we just let sit, without formulating it in prose and then putting it out there? Do people really need to know that I thought Call Me By Your Name was a shitty film? Centuries ago, Saint John of the Cross wrote to a correspondent: “It was not from want of will that I have refrained from writing to you, for truly do I wish you all good; but because it seemed to me that enough has been said already to effect all that is needful, and that what is wanting is not writing or speaking—whereof ordinarily there is more than enough—but silence and work.”

[Silence.]

PAL: Um … did you just deliver a fairly lengthy quote from Saint John of the Cross?

JOHN ARTHUR: I did.

PAL: Do people even do that in real life?

JOHN ARTHUR: No, but in literature they do.

PAL: Okay … So, we’ll just sit with that, then, shall we?

JOHN ARTHUR: Why not?

[Silence, broken only by the bells of the church of Très-Saint-Nom-de-Jésus.]

NOTE: This dialogue was inspired by the form used by Oscar Wilde in “The Critic as Artist.” It may or may not have actually taken place.

John Arthur Sweet usually writes words that he expects to speak, as opposed to words he hopes others will read. In other words, he is a monologist and occasional spoken word poet. If we were living normal lives, he would currently be in England, performing at three theatre festivals. As it is, his last full-length show (Running to Saint Sebastian) was last year, at the Montreal Fringe, and before that, at the Prague Fringe (where he has performed four shows). He is a regular invited artist at Words and Music, most recently for a live-streaming edition in May. www.johnarthursweet.online

Photo credits: John Arthur Sweet

July 15, 2020
A Body Divided—By Joe Bongiorno

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

I jog on the gravel path along the train tracks. I readjust my surgical mask and stray off into the grass to maintain a two-metre distance from a cyclist. My butt throbs. Pain gives way to numbness. Hamstring nerve pinched. I’m out of breath. My lungs open up to the cool air, fortunate to be left breathless by exercise and not COVID-19.

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

June 22, 2020
The View From My Living Room—By Ariela Freedman

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

The term “living room” came into common use after the First World War. Before the living room, there was the front parlour. This room was a formal showpiece, and before the proliferation of funeral homes, they were used to lay out the dead. After the many deaths of the First World War and the Spanish Flu, the front parlour became a haunted space. As early as 1910, the Dutch-born editor of Ladies’ Home Journal published an article titled “A Living Room is Born,” suggesting it was time to revive the staid front parlour; that is, it was time for the room to come back to life. The living room was a rebranding of a space where the dead were once venerated, at a time when they were so many that the house could no longer hold them.

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

June 8, 2020
The Art of Connecting—By Joel Yanofsky

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

This self-isolation business is playing right into my hands. From the time I started thinking of myself as a writer, some forty years ago now, I knew my main talent for the job lay in my ability to cut myself off from other people. In fact, it seemed to be the whole point of the endeavour.

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

May 25, 2020
Homeschooling in a Pandemic—By Greg Santos

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

“You’re used to homeschooling your kids. What’s your advice to other parents who are now in your shoes?”

In a Zoom meeting recently, I was asked this question by an acquaintance. Taken aback, I found myself struggling for a good answer. I rambled something incoherent about how it’s different now during the global COVID-19 pandemic, but I couldn’t properly articulate my thoughts, which left me terribly frustrated. As I write this, I am still struggling to make sense of all of this.

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

May 11, 2020
We Can All Be Writers—By Nisha Coleman

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

I’m a writer but I don’t have much to say right now. I’m a storyteller but I don’t have many stories to tell either. There is an explosion of online content, but I do not feel compelled to contribute. Instead I am watching, listening, noticing.

Week one of the self-isolation measures, amongst the multitude of COVID-19 memes about toilet paper, face touching, and the quarantining-with-kids-chaos, one in particular caught my attention:

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

April 27, 2020
Writer’s Block in the Time of Corona—By Carolyn Marie Souaid

In April 2020, we invited writers in Quebec to submit a story of a single day during the strange, uneasy time of coronavirus and pandemic, of social distancing and self isolation, of lockdown and quarantine.

We’re thrilled to announce that these stories have been gathered in Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic (Guernica Press). To learn more and buy the book, please visit https://www.guernicaeditions.com/title/9781771836579.

Please also join us on the QWF FB Community page, and let the authors know if their words resonated.

In mid-March, COVID-19 was getting out of hand, according to Premier Legault. There was too much handholding, not enough handwashing. I was sent home on a paid, two-week hiatus while they rejigged my job to allow me to work from the confines of my condo.

Wait, what?

To read the rest of the story, please support our community and check out Chronicling the Days: Dispatches from a Pandemic

April 13, 2020
The Honeymoon Phase—By Ann Cavlovic

Someone with two decades of experience getting critiques of their writing shouldn’t curl into a ball after an editor’s comments, right?

Then why, after receiving a developmental edit on my first attempt at a novel, did I find myself in such a pit of despair? (Yes, that pit, that ball; I was every cliché imaginable.)

The simplest explanation involves basic math: a novel is about twenty times the length of a short story, so you have twenty times the problems to fix. On top of this, the stakes for me were especially high: I’d taken a year off work to complete the draft on a small grant, and circumstances left me a single mother, all of which necessitated a weekly budget of $330. Just my son’s weekly piano lessons cost $50.

After taking this big leap and working so hard, I wanted accolades. Instead, the editor posed neutral questions that my anxious mind could easily un-neutralize: ‘What governed your decision to include character X?’ became ‘Why did you even write this useless asshole?’ She didn’t trust the perceptions of the character whose purpose was to explore the nature of human perception, which sent me into an epistemological head explosion about my own perceptions. Sure, many of us ignore positive feedback and focus on the negative (and I hold a PhD in Catastrophizing). This cognitive distortion comes readily when the things working well are described in one page, and the things that aren’t take up fifteen.

It wasn’t so much like I felt this editor had seen me naked. It was as if she’d seen me naked upon return from a ten-day backwoods camping trip and offered logical and helpful observations like: ‘Have you considered taking a shower?’ and ‘But first perhaps another go with some toilet paper?

It wasn’t so much like I felt this editor had seen me naked. It was as if she’d seen me naked upon return from a ten-day backwoods camping trip.

Naturally, my first inclination was to troll the editor on the internet to find evidence of her incompetence. Instead, I rediscovered her facility for insight, nuance, and skilful prose. Dammit.

Yet as I followed the advice of friends and allowed myself a break, ideas started popping up in my mind. How to fix this. How I really could cut that. Yes of course that part was misleading. And I really have no idea how to deal with that subplot but perhaps it will become clear after I fix fifty other problems. These were the kind of blind spots my critique circle might have pointed out on a short story too. Maybe, after such a long period of isolation, I was out of the feedback-receiving habit?

Now my draft manuscript sits on my desk in a neat pile, with dozens of paperclips—all red, I have my standards!—holding together scenes that have literally been cut and collated over months of arduous writing, reworking, and organizing. The day I got back to work, I glanced at my manuscript, and realized the little bubble of joy I’d cradled in my bosom during the brief honeymoon between completion and feedback had popped.

But it probably had to. When I initiated my de-catastrophization protocol and mulled over places to begin, I saw how the editor’s interventions saved me from spending more energy in fruitless directions. I need that energy, because there is a lot, a whole lot, of work still to be done. Instead of resentment or embarrassment, I’m starting to feel appreciation and even something close to affection for this woman I’ve never even met in person. A stranger who’s seen my work, by necessity, at an earlier stage than I’d ever shared work before. There’s a strange intimacy to this.

Speaking of intimacy, I met a wonderful man when finalizing the draft (which is, by the way, not ideal timing for a wannabe novelist, but I’ll take it). Months in, we are still in our honeymoon phase and I am enjoying it fully. Surprisingly, I see that phase more positively than ever, whether it’s for a manuscript or a partner. You need it. You need to build up a reserve of good feelings to get you through the work to come.

Looking at my manuscript now, I realize maybe it was okay how stupidly in love I was.

Looking at my manuscript now, I realize maybe it was okay how stupidly in love I was. Maybe my delusional vision that my first draft would turn out like a fifth draft wasn’t all bad. Maybe, in part, I needed my delusion to get me through.

Some relationships break down. Some manuscripts never get published. Don’t even try to tell me it’s the journey, not the destination; to deny the cost of failure is to deny the courage involved in trying. But with both my manuscript and my new relationship, deep down I have a strong sense of potential. So I will again pour my heart into both, with all the attendant hard work and brutal vulnerability.

Ann Cavlovic’s fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Event, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, Little Bird Stories, PRISM international, Room, SubTerrain, the anthology This Place a Stranger (Caitlin Press), and elsewhere. She wrote Emissions: A Climate Comedy, which won “Best in Fest” at the 2013 Ottawa Fringe theatre festival. If the heart-pouring works, her novel Count on Me will one day see the light of day. Find her in the Gatineau Hills and at: anncavlovic.com.

Photo credits: Ann Cavlovic (header image); David Irvine (headshot)

November 22, 2019
Ghostwriter by Peter McFarlane

Working as a ghostwriter is not something you plan for; it is something you stumble into. In my case, it began when an old friend, a political activist who had long spoken about wanting my help in putting a book together, called to say he had found a private source of funding for it. Was I interested in writing it?

It was a subject I had some a background in so I was able to rough out an outline in a couple of weeks. We got together every couple of months for two-day work sessions and within a year we had a manuscript and a publisher. While I was wrapping up that project, another friend recommended me to someone else who had a story they wanted told, and some funding for it.

This time the world I would be writing about was one I was unfamiliar with, but I liked the subject of the book and I decided to give it a shot. It was during this project that I began to understand what a privilege it can be to tell someone else’s story. I had written biography before, but this was a strange hybrid: a first-person biography. In a very real sense, you become the person you are writing for, internalizing their thoughts and feelings as you use all of the tools at your disposal to tell their story as if was your own.

“I began to understand what a privilege it can be to tell someone else’s story.”

Part of the job is also putting the subject and their life in a larger context. This means researching time and place and weaving their narrative into the world they inhabit. In this, you can allow yourself a measure of literary freedom, secure in the knowledge that the character whose life you are temporarily inhabiting will get a chance to look over your shoulder and make whatever corrections are necessary.

In this case, the book was for someone who had a brief media fame but for the most part lived under the radar. And it was an admirable life. A man with principles and convictions and an unwavering sense of solidarity, moving through a world that was often unwelcoming and at times outright hostile. But he stood his ground and pushed forward and through the force of character made a success of things. That is how the story played out. An honest man confronting his times without compromising his principles. I was pleased that the first publisher I approached picked it up. The experience confirmed to me the truth of the cliché that everyone has a book in them—at least in the sense that all of our stories are worth telling. And for a writer, telling those stories can be as rewarding as any other literary form.

“The experience confirmed to me the truth of the cliché that everyone has a book in them—at least in the sense that all of our stories are worth telling.”

About ghosting in particular, I learned that even what was supposed to be a negative turned out to be a positive. I am speaking about the fact that your work goes unrecognized by the larger public. This might have mattered when I was twenty-five but now that I am over sixty it is a hidden benefit, as I discovered at the launch of my activist friend’s book. It was a relatively big event, with about 200 people packing a hall in Toronto for an on-stage interview. I sat near the back and it was one of the most pleasant literary events I ever attended. I had dinner with my friend before the event and we went out later with others to celebrate. The next day, my friend left for a long but low-budget book tour. I returned to my home in the Laurentians, realizing that I had the best of both worlds: the satisfaction of having written a decent book that was off to find its public and freedom from the obligations that accompany book publishing.

So when the publisher of the recently completed book asked if I would like him to add my name on the cover, I unhesitatingly declined. When the work is finished, better to be free to move on to the next project while someone else has the chore of flogging it. Ghostwriting a book, I discovered, can be a bit like ghosting a party. When you have had your fill, and your fun, you can slip away without stopping for those awkward good-byes.

Peter McFarlane has written five books of nonfiction, including two ghostwritten books, as well as more than 100 newspaper and magazine features. He has specialized in Indigenous history and politics and has worked on several CBC radio programmes as a researcher and on-air contributor. He is currently completing another ghostwritten book and a new work of non-fiction.

Photo: Flickr

October 24, 2016
Busting the Myth of Work-Life Balance by Susan Olding

About a year ago, I was invited to give a talk to some graduate students at Queen’s University about what was billed as “work-life balance.” Sure, I said. Why not? That should be easy.

There was only one small problem. For me, “work-life balance” is an unattainable mirage. I am the farthest thing from an expert on the topic.

The truth is, most of my days pass in a blur of immediate “to-dos.” And the hours that I so carefully set aside for creative work often go instead to the unanticipated trip to the doctor, the emergency phone call from the school or the rush-rush project for the paid job.

I used to spend a lot of time feeling resentful, inadequate and guilty about that. Because other people seemed to combine their creative work with the rest of their lives successfully. Other people seemed to have some magical ability that allowed them to flourish in the face of constant interruptions and distractions.

Except, when I questioned them, these paragons of multi-tasking all felt exactly the same as I did: weary, overwhelmed and vaguely at fault for failing to maintain their inner equilibrium in the face of multiple competing demands.

“Other people seemed to have some magical ability that allowed them to flourish in the face of constant interruptions and distractions.”

Those of us who don’t blame ourselves for this state of affairs sometimes blame the pace of contemporary life. After all, we’re all juggling numerous roles, and we’re all subject to the relentless beeps, pings and dings of our various devices. No wonder we feel beleaguered.

But what if the problem is less about us, less about the world and more about our basic expectations? What if the language we use contributes to our sense of failure? What if the problem is the metaphor itself?

What does “work-life balance” even mean?

Imagine a seal, spinning a ball on its nose. Stop that insane momentum and the whole thing comes crashing down over its head.

Is that how we want to construct ourselves – as performing circus animals? Is that how we want to conduct our writing lives?

Consider other images of “balance” – say the scales of justice… or a teeter-totter. Load up one side and the other comes crashing to the ground. The whole apparatus seems so precarious! No wonder we feel so inadequate. No wonder we fear the possibility that something might shift.

Yet shift it must. Change it must. For “balance” implies stasis – and stasis is antithetical to the creative life.

What if, rather than “balance,” we spoke instead in terms of dynamic harmony, or cycles, or an ebb and flow? That way, we might not feel so guilty or inadequate whenever we had to give one role or another precedence in our lives for a period of time. Say the first few years of our son’s life, or the first few months of a new paid job, or the last few months of work on a novel, when nothing and nobody in the world matters so much as those characters, and we can barely pull ourselves away from our created world to face the real one.

Thinking in terms of ebb and flow rather than “balance” has made it a little easier for me to give myself fully to whatever role is demanding most of me that moment – whether that be partner, wage-earner, teacher, parent, friend, writer.

Outside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

It has also helped me recognize the enormous value of writing retreats. I’ve been privileged to participate in several formal residencies, at places like the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Wintergreen Studios in Ontario and Sage Hill and Stegner House in Saskatchewan. Each of these provides a different kind of experience, but every one offers uninterrupted time and quiet – two of the most precious and hard-to-source ingredients for the creative stew.

Of course, it’s fun to travel, exciting to stare out at different views and blissful to let somebody else do the shopping and cooking and cleaning for a change. But retreats don’t have to be formal or lengthy or costly to be valuable. In fact, some of my most memorable or useful retreats were short, cheap and close to home. Like the weekend I spent in an absent friend’s house powering through the final edits on an important manuscript. Or the day the rest of my family went to Toronto and left me digging in our back garden. In the process, I uncovered the seed of the next book.

Alas, I never did manage to tell those Queen’s students anything helpful about “work-life balance.” Instead, I read them some poetry that I wrote while crouched on one side of the work-life teeter-totter. And dared to suggest that if we’re lucky, there’s no real dichotomy, and “balance” is beside the point. Work is part of life, not separate from life, and life means growth – and change.

Susan Olding is the author of Pathologies: A Life in Essays, winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s Readers’ Choice Award for 2010, and selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her writing has won a National Magazine Award, two Edna Awards and many other honours. A graduate of UBC’s MFA program, she lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario. In the spring of 2016, she’ll facilitate a one-day workshop for the QWF called “Telling It Slant,” where she’ll share some strategies for adding depth and originality to your memoirs, personal essays and short fiction. You can find her at www.susanolding.com.

Photo (top): Inside the Cardinal Studio, one of the Leighton Studios at Banff Centre for the Arts.

October 20, 2015